Horacio Pagani, one of the leading founders of hypercars: ‘Perfection is a word that we don’t use’
From sweeping floors at Lamborghini to creating the world’s first hypercar bearing his name, Horacio Pagani’s story is the stuff of legend. He talks about the pursuit of perfection and the latest product of his obsession with beauty: the Utopia.
As a child, Horacio Pagani would dream up cars and sketch them on a drawing pad, with the hopes of one day designing the most beautiful car in the world. (Photo: Pagani)
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In life, as in art, the beautiful moves in curves,” said 19th century English poet and politician Edward G Bulwer-Lytton. It is for this reason perhaps, that Pagani hypercars, renowned for their beautiful forms, are revered as the pinnacle of automotive art.
It’s a love story that began, rather modestly, more than a half-century ago when a young Horacio Pagani became infatuated with the sculptural silhouettes of the automobile.
Growing up in Argentina the son of an artist and a baker, the lad would spend his childhood days indulging in fantasy as he dreamt up cars that at the time existed only in his mind. He would sketch them on a drawing pad and whittle his ideas from balsa wood, with the hopes of one day designing the most beautiful car in the world.
With Leonardo da Vinci as his patron saint, so to speak, Horacio had become enamoured with the Italian polymath of the High Renaissance whose works as an artist, scientist, engineer and architect demonstrated equal reverence for the fields of both art and science – a philosophy that to this day informs all Pagani creations.
He enrolled in industrial design at university and later switched to mechanical engineering but eventually dropped out, dissatisfied with the curriculum he found uninspiring, and frustrated that he could not find a course of study that married both fields to sufficient degree. Add to that the fact that tertiary education would “steal” five of the most creative years of his life.
Instead, Horacio promptly established his own design studio and found early success working on industrial design projects for commercial clients.
By the age of 20, he had designed and built his first Formula Three racing car and a subsequent stint with Renault was all he needed to showcase his talent. His work offered staggering improvements to the body of Renault’s racing car, and this set the wheels in motion for Horacio’s big move to Italy to pursue his boyhood dream.
FROM SWEEPING FLOORS TO CREATING THE WORLD’S FIRST HYPERCAR
The year was 1982 and desperate to get his foot in the door of a car factory floor, a then-27-year-old Horacio Pagani accepted a job at Lamborghini sweeping floors.
Remarkably, he rose through the ranks to eventually become chief engineer, most notably responsible for the Countach Evolution concept car of 1987, a groundbreaking, one-off prototype made from composite materials including Kevlar and carbon fibre-reinforced plastics. The concept never made it to production, but proved an important testbed for new materials and technologies in Lamborghini’s research and development.
During his time with the Raging Bull, it was again frustration that spurred Horacio’s next move. As the story goes, he wanted to buy an autoclave – an industrial machine for the fabrication of carbon parts – to augment Lamborghini’s production capabilities but his employer refused, deeming it unnecessary as Ferrari apparently didn’t use one at the time.
Prodigiously headstrong by nature, Horacio borrowed the capital to buy his own autoclave, leading to his departure from Lamborghini in 1991.
As top business minds will tell you, it is often in times of crisis that opportunity presents itself, and so Horacio went on to establish his consultancy, Modena Design, which continues to make carbon fibre composites for Formula One cars as well as clients in the automotive, aerospace and biomedical fields today.
